Guatemala Rejects Differentiated Treatment to Cuban Migrants

Q24N (Prensa Latina) The government of Guatemala rejected the differentiated treatment pretended for legal Cuban migrants stranded in Costa Rica, in relation to the thousands of Central Americans who every year are deported from the United States.

Guatemala thinks it is not a humanitarian situation, because these persons are not political refugees, they have not been affected by a war nor by natural disasters´, says a communiqué published this weekend in the digital portal of the Foreign Ministry.

It recognizes that migration is a human right, but the characteristics of the Cuban migration are of economic nature and/or for reasons of family reunion, the same as the Guatemalan migration to the United States.

Thus it believes inadmissible the differentiation of Cuban migration and that of the countries of the Northern Triangle and does not accept that while Guatemalans are returned -over 102 thousand this year-, Cubans are deported North and not to their country of origin or that where they came from.

It reminds that this country is the border between Central America and the North of the continent and until this date, a great number of migrants of the hemisphere, from Asia and Africa attempt to reach the United States through its territory.

Those migrants, it adds, are lodged in the limits with Mexico, reason why ‘another important number of Cuban migrants cannot be added to those who are already there.´

‘It would be necessary for Mexico to guarantee explicitly the reception of those migrants and that Costa Rica guarantees who will pay for the logistic expenses incurred during the transfer´, it suggests.

The communiqué believes that solidarity has to be both ways, that is, if problems this creates to Costa Rica are understood and it wants to collaborate with that country, that nationb must understand the political, economic and social problems that the transfer of those Cubans will créate to Guatemala and Belize, both with the same position on that issue.

Guatemala is ‘a country of integrationist and solidarity vocation with the rest of the Central American Integration System (SICA) members and being a country of origin, destination and transit of migrations, understands the migratory situation in the sister Republic of Costa Rica.

But laments the withdrawal of the Costa Rican delegations from the political meetings of SICA ‘and hopes that Government may understand that it is not about transfering a problema from one country to the other, but to give an effective and definitive solution´.

Around SICA gravitates a political, economic, social, environmental institutionality of its members, of risk management and security, among many others; and the participation of all its members is essential to achieve the hopes of integration of the region, it defines.

‘The challenges faced by the region must be confronted jointly, but understanding the difficulties of each member country´, says the message.

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